Dear colleagues, The Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia (JCEA) is pleased to invite submissions for a special issue titled “Digital Platforms and Digital Labor in East Asia and Beyond.” This issue explores how platform companies have become key infrastructures of contemporary life, reorganizing economic exchange, labor relations, and everyday social interaction. With Asia as a central site of platform innovation—from Alibaba, Meituan, and Didi to Coupang, Rakuten, Grab, Gojek, Shopee and beyond—this special issue highlights how platform-mediated work emerges and is contested in diverse political, social, and cultural contexts, and how these experiences speak back to global debates on the future of work. Across the region, ride-hailing, food-delivery, e-commerce, livestreaming, influencer economies, and other platform-based industries are reshaping what it means to work, organize, and be governed. Platforms promise flexibility, entrepreneurship, and new forms of aspirational and creative labor, yet they also deepen precarity through algorithmic management, opaque data practices, and limited social protections. We therefore invite contributions that critically investigate these tensions, foreground workers’ perspectives, and situate Asian cases within comparative and global conversations on digital capitalism and labor. We welcome submissions from communication and media studies, sociology, anthropology, political economy, labor studies, law, Asian studies, and related fields. Submissions may employ qualitative, quantitative, computational, or mixed methods, and may be empirical or theoretical in nature. Potential topics include (but are not limited to): * Algorithmic management, surveillance, and labor control in platform economies * Worker agency, identity, and resistance in gig and creative labor * Regulation, law, and welfare regimes shaping platform work * Gender, class, race/ethnicity, and migration in digital labor markets * Blurred boundaries between production and consumption (prosumption, user participation, datafication) * Transnational digital labor, outsourcing, and cross-border freelancing * Emerging technologies (AI, automation, blockchain, IoT) and the future of work We particularly encourage papers that place Asian experiences in comparative or global perspective, and that extend or challenge existing theoretical frameworks in digital labor studies, platform capitalism, and critical political economy. The full CFP is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13DVKzyEVc0563TVdQUQzpR-yCDR7Yp-4/view?usp=s... Submission Guidelines Please submit an abstract of up to 500 words in English and a short author bio to j.c.eastern.asia@gmail.com, with “JCEA Special Issue – Digital Platforms and Digital Labor” as the email subject line Key Dates * Abstract submission: 20 March 2026 * Notification of invitation to submit full paper: 1 April 2026 * Full paper submission: 30 September 2026 Further information about the journal is available at: https://jceasia.org/ We very much look forward to your abstracts and to advancing critical conversations on digital platforms and digital labor in East Asia and beyond. Best wishes Dechun Zhang JCEA Managing Editor (on behalf of the JCEA Editorial Board)